Handy Vandal's Almanac

Keith Stuart recently posted a wide range of answers to the question of where good game ideas come from. Excerpt:

Art has proved a fecund source of game ideas. Tetsuya Mizuguchi was inspired by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky to create Rez; Ken Levine drew on the Art Deco movement for Bioshock; Uncharted co-lead designer Richard Lemarchand looked at the works of Victorian painters such as David Roberts and Caspar David Friedrich for the exotic locations that Nathan Drake discovers. And countless dungeon designers have looked at the complex works of MC Escher and Giovanni Battista Piranesi for their labyrinthine environments.

– Keith Stuart @ The Guardian

The Entertainment Software Association recently announced the recipients of scholarships for college courses in video game design and related topics:

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) Foundation awarded 30 students with scholarships for the 2011-12 academic year recently. The purpose is to expand educational opportunities for aspiring game designers and impassion the next generation of industry innovators. Totaling $90,000, 15 college students currently enrolled in video game-related programs, as well as 15 graduating high school seniors aspiring to pursue a degree in video game design or development received scholarships ….

This year’s grantees hail from a diverse collection of 21 colleges and universities from across the nation, including DePaul University, Rochester Institute of Technology, George Mason University, and Drexel University. Additionally, this year’s recipients have academic and artistic concentrations in a wide array of video game-related fields, consisting of computer science and programming, software engineering, graphic design, animation and digital entertainment ….

The wide spectrum of schools and concentrations reflects a growing trend among institutions of higher education to offer video game-related programs ….

Generating over $25 billion in revenue in 2010, the video game industry has proven to be one of America’s fastest-growing business sectors ….

– Game Industry News

Congratulations to the recipients!

See also Entertainment Software Association Foundation.

Shibumi (the game) is the subject of the Shibumi Challenge, an upcoming experiment in automated game design.

The overall aim is to compare the dynamics of evolutionary versus Monte Carlo search methods for game design, and to gauge the usefulness of the computer as a creative collaborator in the game design process.

The ideal game system to test these ideas would be:

• Tightly constrained and with a small, clearly defined rule set.
• Simple enough that most of the rule combination space could be searched.
• Complex enough to provide a range of interesting games.
• Small enough that its board state would fit into a single integer (for efficient implementation).
• Novel enough that its search space was largely unexplored.

While I was looking for such a system, abstract gamer Tom Gilchrist mentioned a concept from Japanese aesthetics called shibui. Shibui objects balance simplicity with complexity; they may initially seem deceptively plain, but will reveal hidden depths and become more interesting the more time is spent with them.

– Cameron Browne @ BoardGameGeek

See also Shibui @ Wikipedia.

Kyle Bean has created a series of “weapons made from harmless materials” for CUT magazine.

These images have a playful quality — playful about violence — which makes me think about game design, and the pleasures of violent videogames.

CUT magazine: ‘Soft Guerilla’

A series of weapons made from harmless materials for a feature article centred around the topic of ‘Guerilla Gardening’ and ‘Yarn Bombing’.

Photography: Sam Hofman

– Kyle Bean

JoelE recently posted some thoughts on “the differences in feel between Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2” which I found interesting, even though I haven’t played those games.

I am particularly impressed by the game JoelE invented to demonstrate his thesis:

To explore what kind of effect secondary military objectives have on games, I made a simple game that can be played on a chess board. Here are the rules:

• 1s can move 1 space
• 2s can move 2 spaces
• 3s can move 3 spaces etc.
• Green spaces upgrade from 1 to 2, 2 to 3, etc.
• Each upgrade space can be only used once per piece.
• To take a piece, move into it.
• The game is lost when all pieces are gone

Here is a picture of the starting position of the game:

If you guys want to try this game, and see how the upgrade spaces affect it, you can play on a chess board, using pawns for level 1, horses for level 2, bishops for level 3, queen for level 4, and king for level 5. You may need to improvise if you run out of pieces.

– JoelE @ teamliquid.net

This is brilliant: re-purposing a chessboard as logic analyzer for computer game strategies.

“Landscape architecture … reminds me of how game design — not just spatial design, but the designs of rules and systems — can shape player behavior.”

Tom Armitage recently posted some interesting observations on landscape architecture and game design:

Above the village of Broadway, in the Cotswolds, stands Broadway Tower. It’s a three-story-high structure, with three turrets: a folly which the Arts and Crafts movement would later use as a holiday retreat. And yet when it was built, in the 18th century, its purpose was not to be an attractive tower to overlook the village.

Rather, it was designed to look good from 22 miles away, from the grounds of the Earl of Coventry. Lovely as it is, its real job is to be a romantic piece of background scenery on the horizon.

It was built by the architect James Wyatt, under the supervision of Capability Brown, who was perhaps the foremost landscape architect in English history. Brown’s work reshaped gardens and grounds into carefully designed views for the owners of houses, and defined what landscape architecture itself could be.

We talk a lot about the influence of architecture on game design …. We can all see the influence on games of a medium in which geometric form and structure is used to influence behavior and manipulate the movement of people through space. It feels like there’s an obvious comparison between architecture and the design of three-dimensional game levels.

But I think landscape gardening is perhaps a much more interesting comparison point for the structure of game spaces, and one that is oft-neglected.

Landscape architecture shapes the behavior and intent of its observers without walls or markers. Instead, it focuses on surprise and delight: as your eye follows the gentle slope of a path down to a lake, it should feel like you discovered this. It feels like a coincidence of marvellous proportions, a secret that you discovered, that the eye is led so gracefully. In fact, it’s a carefully designed experience.

This reminds me of how game design — not just spatial design, but the designs of rules and systems — can shape player behavior.

– Tom Armitage @ Kill Screen

“Every form of media in some sense has [an] ability to displace people in their imagination into some other place … when we see our kids playing these games, we don’t really think of it as the same with reading, but in some sense, people get just as absorbed in books as they do in these games.”

– Will Wright

Via Rock Paper Shotgun.

“It seemed to me that what [players] wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine.”

… I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games.

The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective.

Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality.

Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine.

The real world had disappeared for them — it had completely lost its importance.

They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.

– William Gibson interview @ Paris Review

Gibson is speaking of the early 1980’s — the era leading up Neuromancer.

Games and gambling and social media are combining in profitable new ways:

Crowdpark, a startup developer focused on social betting games, today announced investments totaling about $6 million from Target Partners and existing investor Earlybird Venture Capital. This brings the Berlin-based company’s total amount of funding to approximately $8 million. Waldemar Jantz, partner at Target Partners, will also join the board of Crowdpark.

The funding will be used to enhance the technology, develop cross-platform, create new games, and hire more talent in game design and development.

Crowdpark products offer players the opportunity to bet on real life events in sports, entertainment, business, politics and other topics, and to compete against each other in betting events, using virtual currency. Since the game runs in real time, players can change their bet at any time, as the event or news unfolds.

The company said this is made possible by its patented dynamic betting technology that enables forecasts in social gaming in real-time “similar to how people play the stock market.”

– Chris Marlowe @ dmwmedia.com

Some thoughts on game balance, from a recent article by Adam Robert Thomas:

In general, video games strive for a sense of balance in terms of difficulty. The game needs to be challenging enough that the player is engaged and feels like they’re struggling with a sense of danger that provides tension, yet it also needs to not be so hard that they become frustrated and walk away. This is of course represented in what developer’s like to call difficulty curves.

– The Golden(Eye) Rule of Enemy Design! by Adam Robert Thomas